I Won't Let You Go (37 page)

Ketaki Kushari Dyson,
In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo
(Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1988).

Krishna Kripalani,
Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography,
2nd edition (Visvabharati, Calcutta, 1980).

Prasantakumar Pal,
Rabijibani
, nine volumes; the first two volumes were initially published by Bhurjapatra of Calcutta in 1982 and 1984, but are no longer available in that edition; all nine volumes are currently available from Ananda of Calcutta.

Rabindranath Tagore,
Rabindra-rachanabali
(Collected Works), the older
Visvabharati
edition in 30 volumes.

Rabindranath Tagore,
Chhinnapatrabali
(Visvabharati, 1963 reprint).

Rathindranath Tagore,
On the Edges of Time
(Visvabharati, 2nd edition, 1981).

Heinrich Zimmer,
Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization
(paperback edition, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1962).

80-81.
The Suicide of a Star
(
Sandhyasangit
, Evening Music): When
translating
this poem, I had to decide whether the star should be a
he
or a
she
. The star is clearly anthropomorphised, but as I have explained in the Introduction, Bengali does not distinguish between
he
and
she
, so a decision had to be reached. In the first edition of this book, I had rendered the star as a
he
. It was a nerve-racking decision, as my gut instinct told me that this star should be seen as a female figure.

According to Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay, the author of the first major biography of Tagore in Bengali, this poem refers to a first suicide attempt Kadambari Devi is supposed to have made in 1880. He reckons that the poem must have been written in Calcutta shortly after the incident, perhaps in September of that year. Prasantakumar Pal rejected this suggestion,
maintaining
that the poem reflected no more than a generalised mood of youthful romantic agony. According to him, whether Kadambari had made an early suicide attempt or not cannot be definitively established, and even if she had, Tagore would not have referred to it in this way. Not only was the poem openly published in the Tagore family magazine
Bharati
in the summer of 1881, but it also uses the words
jyoti
(light, radiance) and
jyotirmay
(
luminous
, radiant). Pal argued that if the poem had any conscious reference to Kadambari’s presumed first suicide attempt, then those words would
amount
to deliberate and crude punning on Jyotirindranath’s name, something one does not expect from his sensitive younger brother. (See Pal, vol. 2, 2nd
edition
, p. 109, where Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay’s different view on this matter is also quoted.)

Translating the poem for the first edition, I accepted Pal’s argument and ruled out any conscious reference to Kadambari, but went on agonising over a possible unconscious connection. Suicides often do make one or two initial unsuccessful attempts at self-destruction, succeeding better in their final attempt, and there can be no doubt that any such failed attempt on Kadambari’s part would have been effectively hushed up by the family. A romantic toying with the ideas of unbearable anguish and frustration, and of escape through death, could have been part of the ambience of both the young people,
Rabindranath
and Kadambari. As a person who dipped a great deal in European romantic literature, Rabindranath could have even introduced some of these ideas to his sister-in-law.

In this connection we need to remember Tagore’s collection
Bhanusimha Thakurer Padabali
(The Songs of Bhanusimha Thakur), published by him in 1884 after Kadambari’s death and dedicated to her. The poems had actually been written much earlier and had been accumulating when she was still alive. Tagore says in the dedication that she had often urged him to publish these verses, but while she was alive, he did not do so. The poems and songs in this volume were deliberately written in a mock-medieval style, mimicking the old Baishnab poets. In one of these poems, Radha in a fit of love-pique, addresses Death as her Lover. She says she would prefer Death to Krishna and go to meet him, because Death would never abandon or hurt her, Death would never let her down. The poet, under the pseudonym of Bhanusimha Thakur, tries in an arch manner to dissuade Radha from this project. When in 1931, at the age of 70, Tagore published his Selected Poems under the title of
Sanchayita
, he chose this poem to begin the collection, thereby giving it a symbolic aura. It was as if he was saying to the dead woman, ‘I advised you not to, but you still went ahead and did it. Look – I am not guilty of your death in any way.’

Translating ‘The Suicide of a Star’ for the first edition, I reluctantly
decided
that any direct identification of the star with Kadambari had to be avoided, so translating the third person pronoun with a
she
was out. I
persuaded
myself that in view of the strong bond of sympathy between the young poet and the suicidal but brilliant star,
he
was a logical enough choice. But deep down I was unhappy about this decision, because the original poem with its unisex third person pronoun kept twinkling brightly and
ambiguously
at me in the manner of a star-maiden. I felt that the poem was laughing at the translator’s predicament like a mischievous, cross-dressed Shakespearean heroine.

When I first undertook this translation project, I knew that I had to start my selection with one or two poems from
Sandhyasangit
, the first volume of his poetry that according to the poet himself was stamped with his real
poetical
personality. At that time I did not pay much attention to Tagore’s works from the very early years. Barring
Bhanusimha Thakurer Padabali,
which he admitted to the hall of his Collected Works, the rest of the early works had been banished to two volumes of juvenilia, dubbed
Achalita Sangraha
or ‘
volumes
no longer in circulation’, which effectively functioned as appendices to his oeuvre. These books had been out of print for a long time, and Tagore had been quite reluctant to re-issue them. They were really re-published for historical and archival reasons, and under pressure from his entourage. In the 1990s, in course of a completely different project in which I was involved – on how Tagore’s slightly problematic colour vision had affected his writings and
visual art – I decided to survey all the volumes of the
Rabindra-rachanabali
in the older Visvabharati edition, including the two volumes of the
Achalita
Sangraha
. It was then that I read the early poetic texts with proper attention. These certainly contain plenty of romantic anguish, but they also contain some more startling elements: violent imagery, the near-operatic explosion of jealousies, death-wishes, and wallowings in the idea of self-harm. Today we might be inclined to identify such material with the release of pent-up
youthful
sexual frustration. Here was the dark underbelly, as it were, of the
God-fearing
, Brahmo-Victorian nurturing the junior members of the Tagore family were receiving: the underground rebellion of one hyper-sensitive soul against a repressive regimen. Rabindranath did indeed survive the passage through such gruelling contradictions, and his subsequent personal bereavements to boot, by turning his entire life into one furious frenzy of creativity at multiple levels. But Jyotirindranath’s young wife, perhaps depressive by nature, more easily hurt, and trapped in a childless marriage with a talented and somewhat eccentric man ten years her senior, within a patriarchal setting where there were far fewer opportunities for females to express and fulfil themselves in non-domestic contexts, succumbed. Most critics agree that Kadambari’s
suicide
delivered a profound shock to Rabindranath’s psychology, maturing him. Looking at the early texts, one senses that the event caused him to pull
himself
together and move away from the edge of an abyss. One understands why Tagore was reluctant to re-issue the early texts.

In
Kabi-kahini
(The Tale of a Poet, 1878), Tagore’s first work published in book-form, a very romantic, nature-loving poet leaves his beloved Nalini, who is almost Nature herself personified as a young girl, to travel abroad; when he returns, he finds her dead. The grieving poet is, however, allowed to reach a ripe old age and become a mellowed philosopher, compassionate to all creation. The plot of
Bana-phul
(Forest-flower, 1880) is more disturbing. Although published as a book after
Kabi-kahini, Bana-phul
was written earlier, begun when he was only fourteen and published serially in a magazine in 1876, when he was fifteen. It is Tagore’s first completed poetic opus and described in the title-page as a verse-novel. In it Kamala, a Miranda-like figure, is given shelter by Bijoy after she is left an orphan at the death of her father. Kamala, however, falls in love with Bijoy’s friend Nirad who has shoulder-length hair, while a maiden named Niraja seems enamoured of Kamala’s Bijoy. It could have been a prankish story like
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
but it changes course and moves towards
Romeo and Juliet
. Nirad says he has been told by Bijoy to leave, and he is on his way, but he suddenly falls to the ground, injured, with a knife stuck on his back, while Bijoy is seen slinking off with bloody hands. There is a terrific scene in which Nirad is consumed in a funeral pyre, and at one point we wonder if Kamala is going to throw herself on the flames too, but she doesn’t. She chooses to hurl herself from a snowy mountain peak, falling into a foaming stream which carries her off.

So the young Tagore was quite capable of imagining hopeless love-tangles, conflicts between love and friendship and between old loyalties and new attractions, sexual jealousy and murderous impulses, suicides driven by hurt feelings or love’s despair. In
Bana-phul
we see him indulging in an extremely risqué tragicomic pun involving his own name (Rabi) and that of his elder brother (Jyoti). Kamala’s suicidal fall from the top of a mountain is described as ‘the fall of a bright star from the sky’. This clinched it for me: I decided that
should there be a new edition of my translations, I would change the gender of the star in ‘The Suicide of a Star’ to a
she
.

In the book in which my research colleagues and myself gave the results of our investigations into the effects of Tagore’s protanopic vision on his
literature
and art, I indicated
en passant
that I was moving away from the position that the poem ‘The Suicide of a Star’ had nothing to do with Jyotirindranath and Kadambari (Dyson, Adhikary et al.,
Ronger Rabindranath,
Ananda,
Calcutta
, 1997, p. 15).

What is intriguing is the freedom with which the young Tagore could openly publish his angst-ridden, erotically charged adolescent texts. The value of the freedom of expression was indeed very much in the air, and perhaps his guardians thought that it was better that he should get his obsessive
preoccupations
out of his system. Attention could be deflected from risky details by delaying publication, re-arranging the sequence in which a series of poems had been written, and by editing. ‘The Suicide of a Star’ was first published in
Bharati
in the summer of 1881. That is to say, if Kadambari had really tried to kill herself the previous year, a decent length of time had elapsed and the matter had been hushed up. The poem could now be understood symbolically. And the following year the poet could happily include it in
Sandhyasangit
, acknowledged as his first adult collection. But some anxiety did keep him editing the text of the poem between different editions of this collection, perhaps in an effort to erase the traces of any reference to a real incident and to emphasise the poem’s symbolical nature. Dr Sumana Das of the Bengali Department of Rabindrabharati University, Calcutta, has drawn my attention to an edition of
Sandhyasangit
which collates the variant
readings
of the poems in the collection (Visvabharati, revised reprinting of 1993). Looking at the variant readings of ‘The Suicide of a Star’ here, one realises that Tagore was indeed trying to cover some traces, de-emphasise some aspects of the poem and re-emphasise others. In an article recently published in the departmental journal of her university, Dr Sumana Das has written how surprised she had been to find that in my translation I had rendered the star as a
he
, for she had always imagined this star as a
she
(‘“Tomar srishtir path…” Rabindranather kabitar anubad ebong prasangik kichhu bhabona’,
Rabindrabharati Visvavidyalay: Bangla Bibhagiya Patrika,
vol. 25, June 2008).

81-83.
Invocation to Sorrow
(
Sandhyasangit
): This poem may have been written in Kartik 1287 (mid-October to mid-November of 1880 A.D.) when Jyotirindranath and Kadambari were away in western India on a long holiday and Rabindranath was living in their rooms adjoining the second floor terrace of the Jorasanko house, devoting himself to writing poetry (Pal, vol. 2, 2nd edition, p. 89). One suspects this long holiday was meant to be therapeutic, for curing Kadambari’s depression. Whether or not she had tried to kill
herself
, she might have had a bout of depression, and in those days ‘a change of air’ would be the enlightened remedy for such a condition, as indeed for many other maladies. Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay seems to have supported such a hypothesis. Pal does not commit himself on the health issue, but thinks that Jyotirindranath and Kadambari were away in the hilly regions of western India (Pal, vol. 2, 2nd edition, pp. 69-70, where there is also a relevant
quotation
from Mukhopadhyay). I am inclined to think that both ‘The Suicide of a Star’ and ‘Invocation to Sorrow’ spring from the same emotional turmoil in roughly the same period. If the first one was directly triggered by a suicide
attempt on the part of Kadambari (or her depression), in the second one the agitation is increased by the departure of Jyotirindranath and Kadambari to western India for a long period. The variant readings for the second poem, collated in the edition of
Sandhyasangit
referred to before (Visvabharati, 1993), show the same anxiety to edit material. Some 52 lines which existed in the poem once were cut out and never restored. Four such discarded lines can be translated thus: ‘Having fun has fatigued me exceedingly,/ I can no longer smile a skeleton’s smile,/ fleshless, just teeth and bones!/ Just laughter, just laughter, nothing else!’ Readers can see for themselves the strong echo of ‘The Suicide of a Star’.

83-84.
Endless Death
(
Prabhatsangit
, Morning Music): This is an interesting example of the young poet trying to understand the meaning of life and death in a cosmic context. The poem immediately preceding this one in
Prabhatsangit
is called ‘Endless Life’.